This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: Independent (UK)
Apr 10, 2012
Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a Neolithic portal dolmen, one of Western Europe's oldest ritual burial chambered monuments, in an isolated field in Wales.It is thought the tomb was built from giant boulders about 5,500 years ago. Its capstone bears a seemingly random pattern of dozens of circular holes gouged into its surface – symbols of Neolithic or Bronze Age ritual burial activity.What makes it particularly interesting is that the site has rare remains of human bones and shards of decorated pottery. An official burial licence must now be sought before the bones can be removed, but eventually radiocarbon-dating and other tests planned for the remains may give new insight into our early farming ancestors....
Source: AP
Apr 10, 2012
It's a game that every Ukrainian knows about: The "Death Match" of 1942, when top Kiev soccer players trounced a team of Nazi occupiers and reportedly paid for it with their lives.But Ukrainian authorities on Tuesday froze the release of a movie depicting that Soviet defiance of Nazi Germany because of concerns it could ignite explosive emotions just weeks before Ukraine co-hosts the 2012 European Championship.Officials fear that "The Match," which extolls the heroism of Ukrainian soccer players but portrays many Kiev residents as Nazi collaborators would teach Ukrainian audiences the wrong image of their country and history.Some experts also fear that it may stoke hostility toward German players fans as Ukraine hosts several games played by Germany's national team....
Source: WaPo
Apr 10, 2012
A telltale sign that Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara no longer believed in the Vietnam War came not from anything he said publicly, but how he said it.Harold Brown, who served under McNamara at the Pentagon as director of defense research and engineering and later as secretary of the Air Force, came to recognize the mannerisms McNamara would display when voicing public support for policies with which he privately disagreed.McNamara would “lean forward and pull his socks up,” Brown said Tuesday.“Bob became skeptical about the Vietnam War well before he stopped talking about how great it was going,” added Brown, who later served as secretary of defense under President Jimmy Carter....
Source: Belfast Telegraph (UK)
Apr 10, 2012
A magical dwarf from sixth century Garvagh who could only be killed by a stake through the heart has been singled out as the possible source of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.Tracing nearly 120 years of the Transylvanian count’s enduring appeal, suggestions have been made that it might have been “the little known sixth century legend of Abhartach who could well be Ireland’s own Dracula.”“Abhartach was a tribal ruler in an area near the Derry town of Garvagh, a misshapen and tyrannical dwarf possessed of magical powers whose brutal reign eventually forced his terrified subjects to hire a mercenary called Cathain to assassinate him. Cathain accomplished his task only for the fearsome dwarf to emerge from his grave the next day demanding a bowl of blood from the wrists of his subjects to ‘sustain his vile corpse’,” according to the Irish Daily Mail....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 10, 2012
Britain wants Argentina to pay back £45 million in loans that the country's former military junta used to fund equipment that was later used in the invasion of the Falkland Islands.The demand comes amid continued tensions between London and Buenos Aires around the 30th anniversary of the war over the South Atlantic territory.Details of the loans, uncovered by a campaign group, showed how Argentina's government borrowed the money in 1979. It was partly spent on equipment used to seize the islands three years later, before they were recaptured by Britain....
Source: AP
Apr 9, 2012
One of America's most famous historic sites has again made history as a record 328,000 visitors took the tour boat last year to Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor to see where the Civil War began.Spurred in part by the observance of the 150th anniversary of the war, the trend continues this year.Visitation at Fort Sumter was up another 11 percent during the first three months of this year as compared to the record-setting mark in 2011, said Dawn Davis, the chief ranger of the U.S. Park Service Fort Sumter National Monument which includes Sumter, Fort Moultrie on Sullivans Island and the Charles Pinckney Historic Site in nearby Mount Pleasant....
Source: Discovery News
Apr 9, 2012
Farming without fire in tropical regions, like indigenous populations did in Pre-Columbian times, may be the key to both feeding people and managing land more sustainably.For hundreds of years before Columbus arrived in Central America, indigenous people converted vast swaths of tropical savannas into agricultural fields with raised beds for growing crops -- all without the use of slash-and-burn or other fire-intensive techniques, which are common today and a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.But soon after 1492, there came a sharp surge in uncontrolled burns throughout the Amazon’s coastal landscapes, found a new study that dug into more than 2,000 years worth of soil. Those carbon-emitting burning practices, which continue today, contribute significantly to global warming....
Source: NYT
Apr 9, 2012
What doomed the Titanic is well known, at least in outline. On a moonless night in the North Atlantic, the liner hit an iceberg and disaster ensued, with 1,500 lives lost.Hundreds of books, studies and official inquiries have addressed the deeper question of how a ship that was so costly and so well built — a ship declared to be unsinkable — could have ended so terribly. The theories vary widely, placing the blame on everything from inept sailors to flawed rivets.Now, a century after the liner went down in the early hours of April 15, 1912, two new studies argue that rare states of nature played major roles in the catastrophe.
Source: Times of India
Apr 9, 2012
History books are inching back on the shelves - but with a dash of drama and peppy language to hook the average reader."I think there are two major attractions that a historical narrative holds for us. First, history is all about stories...stories about people and places with the benefit of hindsight. And who doesn't like a good story?" asked Udayan Mitra, publisher of Allen Lane and Portfolio imprints at Penguin Books India, said."And the second: historical epics are full of heroism, grandeur and romance - something that entertains everyone," Mitra said.People read historical fiction because they give readers a window into a time they have no idea of, says Priya Kapoor, editor and director of Roli Books."Historical fiction brings alive history in a more entertaining way. We would certainly like to know how people of that time lived, what they ate and what did they do. Such books take history to another level," Kapoor said....
Source: WBUR
Apr 9, 2012
The wall of silence in Indonesia surrounding one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century is beginning to fall apart. A forthcoming report by Indonesia's National Commission on Human Rights estimates that a purge of suspected communists during the mid-1960s killed between 600,000 and 1 million people.The violence reshaped Indonesia's political landscape and affected the course of the Cold War, just as the U.S. was escalating its fight against communism in Southeast Asia."We conclude that there have been gross human rights violations, which can be classified as crimes against humanity," says Yosep Adi Prasetyo, the commission's deputy chairman.He says the report places the blame squarely on Indonesia's military dictator Suharto, who died four years ago....A major general in the Indonesian army at the time, Suharto ousted Sukarno, the revered Indonesian independence leader and the country's first president, in the wake of the kidnapping and killing of senior Indonesian generals on Sept. 30, 1965....
Source: WaPo
Apr 8, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO — Shuttering dozens of California state parks to trim millions from the state budget will take more than simply hanging a “Closed” sign on trailheads and beach parking lots. Many on the closure list house thousands of historical treasures that must be packed up, catalogued and stored if deals are not reached to save them.The tens of thousands of items on public display paint a rich portrait of California’s past. Among them are rare crystalline gold nuggets at the California Mining and Minerals Museum in Mariposa, painting masterworks showing early 20th century San Francisco street scenes and coastal landscapes at Shasta State Historical Park, and the writer Jack London’s home and writing memorabilia in Sonoma County.California officials admit they have been overwhelmed by the unprecedented move to close the parks, and just months before the planned closures they are working to catalog these important pieces of state history so they can undertake a massive packing, moving and storage effort should a deal not be reached. And if the state does have to move thousands of delicate items, it does not currently know how much it will cost — or how much of its projected $22 million in savings it will lose to pay for packing and long-term storage....
Source: WaPo
Apr 8, 2012
“Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress. And I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint — that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example. And I’m pretty confident that this Court will recognize that and not take that step.”-- President Obama, discussing the pending U.S. Supreme Court decision over his health care law, April 2, 2012
Source: Yahoo News
Apr 8, 2012
SANFORD, Florida (Reuters) - The year before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier by becoming the first African American to play major league baseball, he fled the racist threats of townspeople in Sanford, Florida, where Trayvon Martin was shot 66 years later.It was 1946 and Robinson arrived in this picturesque town in central Florida for spring training with a Brooklyn Dodgers farm team. He didn't stay long.Robinson was forced to leave Sanford twice, according to Chris Lamb, a professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, who wrote a graphic account of Robinson's brush with 100 angry locals in a 2004 book....
Source: NYT
Apr 8, 2012
New York, the city, knew all about the Titanic before the problem with New York, the ship.The Titanic — the largest passenger ship the world had seen, and the most unbelievably and unapologetically opulent — was an event before it was an event, and New York had read all about it in progress reports on the positioning of the stern frame, in accounts of its launching and in short paragraphs about brief test runs. And then, as it left Southampton, England, on its maiden voyage, it yanked the New York, which was alongside it at the pier, from its moorings.This was four days before the problem with the iceberg....
Source: NYT
Apr 8, 2012
Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan weighed in on the role of religion in politics in an Easter Sunday appearance on “Face the Nation,” pledging to fight President Obama’s contraception policy and defending Rick Santorum over a comment that reading John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech about the separation of church and state almost made him throw up.Speaking at a Catholic college in New Hampshire last fall, Mr. Santorum said that when he had read Kennedy’s speech, “I almost threw up.” He added: “In my opinion it was the beginning of the secular movement of politicians to separate their faith from the public square, and he threw faith under the bus in that speech.”...
Source: NYT
Apr 8, 2012
...England and his friend and roommate, Alvin Watts, 32, waged what city leaders believe was a racially motivated shooting rampage in the predominantly black neighborhoods of north Tulsa early Friday morning, driving through the streets in a pickup truck and randomly shooting pedestrians. Three black people were killed, and two others were wounded in the attacks....Tulsa officials said the shootings were unlike anything the city had ever seen in its modern history. None of the victims knew one another, and all of them were shot within a few miles. Mr. Henderson said he had heard from constituents that in one of the shootings, the suspects had approached their victims at random and asked for directions. “When they turned around to walk away, they just opened fire,” Mr. Henderson said.In 1921, Tulsa was the scene of a riot that is one of the deadliest episodes of racial violence in the nation’s history, in which a mob of white Tulsans destroyed a black neighborhood and killed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of black residents....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Apr 7, 2012
Rudolph Hess believed the Jews had hypnotised Winston Churchill into taking a negative stance towards Nazi Germany, according to the Deputy Nazi leader's recently discovered psychiatric records.Notes written by Dr Henry Dicks, one of the Army psychiatrists who monitored Hess while he was a prisoner in Britain, detail his bizarre convictions.Hess believed Churchill had been 'mesmerised' by evil forces who were trying to kill him because he was the 'only person who knew of their secret psychic powers'....
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
Apr 7, 2012
A Mormon missionary in the South in 1879 wrote that, "A person traveling among the Southern people realizes that though they have been whipped by the North, yet there is a feeling of enmity existing in their bosoms, which only needs a little breeze to inflame their passions to deeds of carnage and strife."In "Last Letter Home From Elder Joseph Standing" printed in the Deseret News, that same missionary said that "The 4th [of July] is not much cared for in the South."Three days after noting this lack of patriotic fervor, Standing would be shot and killed.Utahns sat out the Civil War and have a hard time understanding why broad swaths of the South refused to celebrate the Fourth of July even decades after the event. Many communities didn’t do so until World War II. The reason: Southerners have long memories and know how to carry a grudge.Utahns’ memories are shorter. We forget that it was dangerous to be a Mormon in the South. Along with blacks, Jews and Catholics, Mormons were a particular target of the white, Protestant establishment, which was intent on re-establishing its prewar privileges....
Source: NYT
Apr 7, 2012
Jimmy Breslin assessed the Mets one recent afternoon, dressed in blue pajamas, red-and-green robe and black slippers.“They got no one,” he said, slumped on a sofa in his Manhattan apartment.To reach that conclusion, he first called Seymour Siwoff, who runs Elias Sports Bureau. Siwoff told him they were not very good.He told Breslin to call Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ public-relations chief. “I call him on some bus down south,” Breslin said, “and I say, ‘Who do you got?’ He tells me about Wright, Murphy and Lucas Duda.” Breslin pronounced Duda DOO-doh.Breslin jotted notes on a manila folder, homework for an interview with a reporter....
Source: NYT
Apr 7, 2012
The two young men had woefully little in common: one was a wealthy Mormon from Michigan, the other a middle-class Jew from Israel.But in 1976, the lives of Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu intersected, briefly but indelibly, in the 16th-floor offices of the Boston Consulting Group, where both had been recruited as corporate advisers. At the most formative time of their careers, they sized each other up during the firm’s weekly brainstorming sessions, absorbing the same profoundly analytical view of the world.That shared experience decades ago led to a warm friendship, little known to outsiders, that is now rich with political intrigue. Mr. Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is making the case for military action against Iran as Mr. Romney, the likely Republican presidential nominee, is attacking the Obama administration for not supporting Mr. Netanyahu more robustly.
